I find it depressing that developers are so willing to blame themselves over a basic fact of life. Let's categorize performance into 4 poorly-defined groups: p

I find it depressing that developers are so willing to blame themselves over a basic fact of life. Let's categorize performance into 4 poorly-defined groups: perfectly optimized, highly optimized, reasonably optimized, poorly optimized Everyone expects you to do the reasonable thing. I mean no disrespect, but finding examples of poor optimization does not justify elitist attitudes when most developers are just being reasonable otherwise. We all agree poorly optimized code is bad and never justified. I hope we all agree that anyone is capable of at least optimizing beyond what is reasonable. Anyone who has slaved over it knows this is not a skill to be proud of. We should all wish this aspect be automated (much of it has been). If a business case is ever made to optimize beyond what is considered reasonable, then you'll get to perform your hobby for pay. Does anyone seriously believe any products are perfect? Bonus words: To address the complaints about web dev, get familiar with the waterfall diagram in the network tab of your browser's dev tools and behold where almost all the time goes. Stop embarrassing yourself complaining about javascript. What you will typically find is slow backend responses, poorly organized backend APIs that demand a long series chain of requests to get what the page needs, huge unoptimized images, and yes ads. Blaming slow web pages on anything but the organization as a whole that produced it is naive.